Broker
Beurokeo
Hirokazu Kore-eda (2022)
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s many virtues as a film-maker include liking his characters but his benignity is part of what makes Broker diffusely sentimental. Since the well-deserved international success of Shoplifters (2018), Kore-eda has, on the surface at least, been branching out. He made The Truth (2019) in France, with French actors (plus Ethan Hawke). Broker takes place in South Korea and the cast is South Korean. Kore-eda’s work in Japan since Shoplifters has been restricted to The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, his first television drama series in more than a decade, released on Netflix in January this year. But his chief interest has continued to be family relationships, however unorthodox or dysfunctional the family unit may be. This applies to The Makanai, with its geisha house ‘family’, and it’s certainly the case with Broker.
Outside a church in Busan, a young single mother, So-young (Lee Ji-Eun), leaves her baby in the church’s ‘baby box’. Inside, Dong-soo (Gang Dong-weon), who has some kind of job at the church, deletes CCTV footage of the deposit. His friend, an older man called Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), runs an illegal business selling babies on the adoption black market, with Dong-soo’s help. So-young discovers what the men are up to and insists on coming on the road with them to interview potential parents for her child, Woo-sung (Ji-yong Park). In pursuit of the trio is a pair of Busan detectives, Su-jin (Doona Bae) and Lee (Lee Joo-young). During the journey, Sang-hyun and co stop off at an orphanage where Dong-soo, himself abandoned in infancy, was raised – and where he seems to be greeted as a kind of local boy made good. High-spirited, eccentric Hae-jin (Seung-soo Im), one of the kids in the orphanage, determinedly attaches himself to the visitors and stays with them for the rest of their travels.
In the course of these travels, we learn, among other things, that So-young was a prostitute who murdered her baby’s father, and that Sang-hyun has a teenage daughter of his own from a broken marriage. These revelations are handled with a sensitivity, sympathy and lack of sensationalism all typical of Kore-eda. The conversation between Sang-hyun and his daughter Jung-ae (Jung Ah-young) in a fast-food joint, when she tells him that her mother has remarried and is expecting a baby, is particularly touching. The acting throughout the cast is excellent, especially from Song Kang-ho (best known in the West for a very different family drama, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019)) and Gang Dong-weon. There are fascinating details, not least the church baby box at the start. Leaving a newborn there seems hygienic and superficially cosy – the apparatus plays a lullaby once the baby has been locked into the box – but those qualities serve also to make the process more clinical and to sharpen the sense of abandonment.
Yet Broker drags and digresses: at a little over two hours, it’s actually around average length for a Kore-eda film but feels longer than its predecessors. More problematic is the story’s wistful subtext (as usual, Kore-eda wrote the screenplay, and edited the film too) – that people just-want-to-be-part-of-a-family. Perhaps the main characters in Broker, understandably enough, see that kind of belonging as a passport to happiness but it’s surprising that their naivete is left unexplored – by a film-maker much of whose best work (Still Walking (2008), After the Storm (2016), Shoplifters) dramatises so acutely the pros, cons and wrenching complication of family ties. There’s a scene late on in Broker in which So-young says, to each of her three companions and finally her baby boy, ‘Thank you for being born’, and Hae-jin thanks her in return. This affecting moment would have more impact if there were more astringency elsewhere in the film. Jung Jae-il’s music, of which there’s plenty, reinforces Broker’s prevailing mild, fuzzy tone.
28 February 2023